Find out more about other OERs created in the same JISC-funded programme as Observing the 1980s. How digitised ‘special’ collections are boosting experiences of teaching and learning : JISC.
Author Archives: Jill Kirby
Feedback video
Find out what students and other users have said about the Observing the 1980s collection in our video.
Media coverage
See latest media coverage in The Guardian!
Poofters, Pop and Pandemics
On the 28th November Dr Lucy Robinson was invited to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) event Poofters, Pop and Pandemics at Bishopsgate Institute. The evening began with an introduction to the LAGNA archive by Robert Thompson who demonstrated how useful the newsmedia archives could be in understanding gay experience and … Read more
New Frontiers – it’s longitudinal research, but not as we know it…
Dr Lucy Robinson picked up some great mentions for the project at the New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research event at the University of Southampton last week (look out for ‘teabags’ – all about perforations in time!)
She gave a paper based on the Observing the 1980s material and some of the learning that … Read more
Dissemination, repositories and social media
While final work is going on to put all of the many links to the digitised materials into our OER, we’re also now focusing on how we’re going to get our resources seen and used. As well as the university’s own research repository, Sussex Research Online, where we hope eventually to place all of … Read more
Observing Tattoos and Textiles with Davison High
Here’s Dr Lucy Robinson’s report on a great visit from students from Davison High:
On Friday 14th September a group of 14 Year 10 students taking the BTEC in Fashion from Davison High School came to the archive to explore attitudes to body adornment (particularly tattooing). Their teacher Ms Jane Green had arranged the visit to … Read more
Information architecture or what will the OER look like?
Although our OER is broadly based on an existing taught course at Sussex, materials for which sit on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment, the addition of a huge quantity of primary sources means we need to rethink its structure. Like many of the apparently ‘simple’ steps in this project, this turns out to be a … Read more
Managing the unexpected
One of the important elements of using Mass Observation materials is ensuring the correspondents’ anonymity. Although some are perfectly happy to be identifiable, many are not. For that reason their contributions are listed under a unique identifier code consisting of a letter and number eg A883.
What we have found recently, however, is that many people, … Read more
Mass Observation 75th Anniversary Conference
What better place for some project publicity than the MO 75th anniversary conference last week? Thanks to our banners and leaflets and the very marvellous project necklaces (modelled by Jessica above and in detail below!) we garnered some really useful interest in the project. Academics running courses at various UK and overseas … Read more